Elon Musk is dead wrong about working from home | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk is dead wrong about working from home

computerworld.com

8 pointsCrankyBear9 comments

When I work from home I don’t have commute time. However, when I work in the office I might have commute time ranging from “basically nine” to O(hours). So, if it’s hours, I can’t see how I can be as productive “in the office”unless I view commuting time as “my” time not “office” time.

Of course people can be more productive in 10 hours than 8, right? It’s just that they’re no longer willing to fork over all that personal time to their employer. Takes 1 hour each way? Do 6-ish hours in the office.

Also when you factor in the additional "getting ready to go to work" time (shower/bath, choosing outfit, breakfast etc) vs. a quick brush of the teeth and the extra 'unwind time' needed at the end of the work day means that WFH is indeed more productive imo.

I do however understand the fact/issue that some WFH employees aren't self-disciplined enough not to constantly goof-off and picking them up on that is a lot harder than if in the office where you (as a manager) can directly observe it. Also, explaining to employee X that employee A and B can WFH but employee Z can't is an impossible task.

Managers love metrics so if it is indeed more productive to WFH (which I think is accurate) then it should be easy enough for the employees to provide some solid figures. Depending upon the bean-counter that you need to browbeat dictates what metrics to use on them (aka drag them in to the 21st century).

I like my commute. i think of solutions to problems in that downtime behind the wheel. Plus then i don't view my office at home as "work" and i get to enjoy my time in there too (gaming, 3d printing etc)

One of my coworkers swears he's more productive at home - but when he is doing so he's not helping with the day to day walk up issues, or phone calls (which is also part of his job)

Naturally all roles are different in this regard, however I don't miss rush hour, constant interruptions, and noisy environments. This all happened because everyone was going into the office at the same time. I don't get why companies like to create these types of bottlenecks by making everyone do the same thing at the same time.

I find this comment interesting as a single example, especially with the data that's available on the topic. So many studies showing that remote and flexible working arrangements result in objectively higher productivity. At the same time, recent surveys show that people don't trust their colleagues to work hard while remote.

I'm sure we've all encountered someone we perceive as a lazy colleague. I'm also sure most of us will agree that data trumps anecdotes. If we accept that the the studies and surveys are all correct, this means that we're all being pretty tough on our colleagues despite their (overall) high performance.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/working-hard-or-hardly-working...

“57% claiming their productivity and the quality of their work had improved”

This is like a survey question asking “How large is your penis?”

Except for the fact it's backed up by independent studies. Of course people will blow their own trumpets - in this case, it's justified.

Top 3 results for me on 'remote working productivity studies', and there are countless more that come to the same conclusion:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/09/29/remote-wor... https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2022/02/04/3-new-... https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivi...

Just to play Devil's Advocate, what this article might get wrong is that it's taking Elon Musk at face-value. Everybody has hidden motives, and I'm not sure that we know what any public figure's genuine position on any given issue always is.

I could give quite a few examples about Elon Musk in particular, but just to give a generic point, many companies might be outwardly strongly favoring working in the office as a means to try and achieve stealth layoffs without admitting weakness in their core business. Some companies are probably hoping that 5-10% of their workforce decide to quit so they can avoid some layoffs and the questions, pressure, and possible reduced investor confidence that comes from an actual layoff.

Are you being so cynical as to suggest that Elon's announcement might have anything to do with optimizing his Tesla layoff, or bullying Twitter? Perish the thought.

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